Thomas Hardy

“ An earthen cutting out from a city:
There was no scope for view,
Though the frail light shed by a slim young moon
Fell like a friendly tune.
Fell like a liquid ditty,
And the blank lack of any charm
Of landscape did no harm.
The bald steep cutting, rigid, rough,
And moon-lit, was enough
For poetry of place: its weathered face
Formed a convenient sheet whereon
The visions of his mind were drawn. ”

“ She put on youth in her look and air,
And more was he wonderstruck as he viewed
Her form and flesh bloom yet more fair
While he watched her there;
Till she freshed to the pink and brown
That were hers on the night when first they met,
When she was the charm of the idle town,
And he the pick of the club-fire set. . . .
His eyes grew wet,
And he stretched his arms: "Stay—rest!—"
He cried. “Abide with me so, my own!"
But his arms closed in on his hard bare breast;
She had vanished with all he had looked upon
Of her beauty: gone. ”

“ Stowed in the backmost slums of a soon-reached city,
Merely on chance to uncloak some worthy canvas,
Panel, or plaque, blacked blind by uncouth adventure,
Yet under all concealing a precious art-feat.
Such I had found not yet. My latest capture
Came from the rooms of a trader in ancient house-gear
Who had no scent of beauty or soul for brushcraft.
Only a tittle cost it—murked with grime-films,
Gatherings of slow years, thick-varnished over,
Never a feature manifest of man’s painting. ”

“ And the thin note of pity that came: "A King's daughter is she,"
As they passed where she trodden was once by the chargers' footfall?
Could such be the hauntings of men of to-day, at the cease
Of pursuit, at the dusk-hour, ere slumber their senses could seal?
Enghosted seers, kings—one on horseback who asked “Is it peace?" . . .
Yea, strange things and spectral may men have beheld in Jezreel! ”

“ WE are always saying
"Good-bye, good-bye!"
In work, in playing,
In gloom, in gaying:
At many a stage
Of pilgrimage
From youth to age
We say, "Good-bye,
Good-bye!"
We are undiscerning
Which go to sigh,
Which will be yearning
For soon returning;
And which no more
Will dark our door,
Or tread our shore,
But go to die,
To die.
Some come from roaming
With joy again ”

“ Sings he that song on Sundays
In some dim land afar,
On Saturdays, or Mondays,
As when the evening star
Glimpsed in upon his bending face
And my hanging hair,
And time untouched me with a trace
Of soul-smart or despair? ”

“ IN the heart of night,
⁠When farers were not near,
⁠The left house said to the house on the right,
"I have marked your rise, O smart newcomer here.”
⁠Said the right, cold-eyed:
⁠"Newcomer here I am,
⁠Hence haler than you with your cracked old hide,
Loose casements, wormy beams, and doors that jam.
⁠"Modern my wood,
⁠My hangings fair of hue;
⁠While my windows open as they should,
And water-pipes thread all my chambers through.
⁠"Your gear is gray,
⁠Your face wears furrows untold." ”

“ It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry—"the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science," as it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas. ”

“ In that last parting;
They thrilled him not now,
In the selfsame place
With the selfsame sun
On his war-seamed face.
"Lurks a god's laughter
In this?" he said.
"That I am the living
And she the dead!" ”

“ I SOMETIMES think as here I sit
Of things I have done,
Which seemed in doing not unfit
To face the sun:
Yet never a soul has paused a whit
On such—not one.
There was that eager strenuous press
To sow good seed ”

“ The thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously like those of one of Shelley’s paper-boats on a windy lake. And a forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better time, unless men’s tendencies should change. ”

“ WE stand in the dusk of a pine-tree limb,
⁠As if to give ear to the muffled peal,
⁠Brought or withheld at the breeze's whim;
⁠But our truest heed is to words that steal
⁠From the mantled ghost that looms in the gray,
⁠And seems, so far as our sense can see,
⁠To feature bereaved Humanity,
⁠As it sighs to the imminent year its say:—
⁠"O stay without, O stay without,
⁠Calm comely Youth, untasked, untired ”

“ I must trust for right note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any one’s train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver’s rest between, and be led thereby to miss the writer’s aim and meaning in one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply regret it. ”

“ The song kept softening, loudening on,
⁠In placid calm unheed.
"What home is yours now?" then I said;
⁠"You seem to have no care."
But the wild wavering tune went forth
⁠As if I had not been there.
"This world is dark, and where you are,"
⁠I said, "I cannot be!" ”

“ In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion—I include religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing—these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and "the truth that shall make you free," men's minds appear, as above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on. ”

“ If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:
that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though so old as to underlie the Christian idea, and even to permeate the Greek drama) ; and the subject is charitably left to decent silence, as if further comment were needless. ”

“ Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And "Hell!" and "Shell!" were yapped at Lovingkindness.
III
The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To "dug-outs," "snipers," "Huns," from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused—
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept. ”

“ Why was she near there if love had fled?
She did not turn,
Though the gate was whence I had often sped
In the mists of morning to meet her, and learn
Her heart, when its moving moods I read
As a book—she mine, as she sometimes said ”

“ Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: “We are not whipped to-day";
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon's thin horn. ”

“ The flux of flustering hours
Of their own tide would bring us
By no device of ours
To where the daysprings well us
Heart-hydromels that cheer,
Till Time enearth and swing us
Round with the turning sphere. ”

“ Unto your own new-builded door
⁠For a staunch lifelong stay.
⁠You said: “It seems to be,
⁠My friend,
That I were bringing to my place
⁠The pure brine breeze, the sea,
The mews—all her old sky and space,
⁠In bringing her with me!” ”

“ But in my memoried passion
⁠For evermore stands she
In the gown of fading fashion
⁠She wore that night when we,
Doomed long to part, assembled
⁠In the snug small room; yea, when
She sang with lips that trembled,
⁠"Shall I see his face again? ”

“ So indeed of all art, literature, and “high thinking” nowadays. Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, “a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (to quote Wordsworth again) , or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age. ”

“ And thus you do not count upon
⁠Continuance of joy;
But, when at ease, expect anon
⁠A burden of annoy.
But, Sage—this Earth—why not a place
⁠Where no reprisals reign,
Where never a spell of pleasantness
⁠Makes reasonable a pain? ”

“ And of her who was waiting him sobs from near,
As they haunt there and drink the worm-wood cup
They filled for themselves when their sky was clear.
Yes, I see those roads—now rutted and bare,
While over the gate is no sun-glazed sea ”

“ And he heard seductive sighs;
But the face,
And the eyes,
And the place,
And the sighs,
Were not, alas, the right ones—the ones meet for him—
Though fine and sweet the features, and the feelings all abrim. ”

“ To the air of "Haste to the Wedding,"
⁠As after a wedding-day;
Yea, up and down the middle
⁠In windless whirls went they!
There danced the bride and bridegroom,
⁠And couples in a train,
Gay partners time and travail
⁠Had longwhiles stilled amain! . . . ”

“ I, who as innocent withwind climb,
⁠Sir or Madam,
Am one Eve Greensleeves, in olden time
Kissed by men from many a clime,
Beneath sun, stars, in blaze, in breeze,
As now by glowworms and by bees,
⁠All day cheerily,
⁠All night eerily! ”

“ By Halworthy,
A man was drawing near to me.
I'd no concern at anything,
No sense of coming pull-heart play;
Yet, under the silent outspreading
Of even's wing
Where Otterham lay,
A man was riding up my way. ”

“ Grew long, and evenings goldened;
But I was not emboldened
By her prompt eyes and winning ways.
And when old Winter nipt the haws,
"Another's wife I'll be,
And then you'll care for me,"
She said, "and think how sweet I was!" ”

“ SONG OF SILENCE
(E. L. H.—H. C. H.)
SINCE every sound moves memories,
⁠How can I play you
Just as I might if you raised no scene,
By your ivory rows, of a form between
My vision and your time-worn sheen,
⁠As when each day you
Answered our fingers with ecstasy? ”

“ Saw pouting, nor curling in quarrel,
⁠Nor sought for, nor missed them.
Not a word passed of love all our lifetime,
⁠Between us, nor thrill;
We'd never a husband-and-wife time,
⁠For good or for ill. ”

“ Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be, alas, by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment on where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in these disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that amendment and not madness lies that way. ”

“ Here I went tempting frail youth nightly
⁠To their death;
But you deemed me chaste—me, a tinselled sinner!
How thought you one with pureness in her
⁠Could pace this street
⁠Eyeing some man to greet? ”

“ That had seen every larger phase
⁠Of human ways
⁠Before these filled the place.
To them that house's tale is theirs,
⁠No former voices call
Aloud therein. It aspect bears
⁠Their joys and cares
⁠Alone, from wall to wall. ”

“ For—while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible—it must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of “obstinate questionings” and “blank misgivings” tends to a paralysed intellectual stalemate. ”

“ And we shall trace their oncreeping
To where the cascade tumbles down
And sends the bobbing growths aswing,
And ferns not quite but almost drown.
"—We shall," I say; but who may sing
Of what another moon will bring! ”

“ Their old one was sold and broken;
⁠Years past it went amiss."
"—I heard it, or shouldn't have spoken:
⁠A strange house, this!
“I catch some undertone here,
⁠From some one out of sight."
"—Impossible; we are alone here,
⁠And shall be through the night."
“—The parlour-door—what stirred it?"
⁠"—No one: no soul's in range." ”

“ Swing the doors open noisily?
Show as an umbraged ghost beside
⁠Your ancient tree?
Or will you, softening, the while
You further and yet further look,
Learn that a laggard few would fain
⁠Preserve your nook? . . . ”

“ THE MAID OF KEINTON MANDEVILLE
(A TRIBUTE TO SIR H. BISHOP)
I HEAR that maiden still
Of Keinton Mandeville
Singing, in fights that played
As wind-wafts through us all,
Till they made our mood a thrall
To their aery rise and fall,
"Should he upbraid." ”

“ Had we mused a little space
⁠At that critical date in the Maytime,
One life had been ours, one place,
⁠Perhaps, till our long cold claytime.
—This is a bitter thing
⁠For thee, O man: what ails it?
The tide of chance may bring
⁠Its offer; but nought avails it! ”

“ Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may, to be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and reader seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable cases of divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious effort is made towards that which the authority I have cited—who would now be called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial—affirmed to be what no good critic could deny as the poet's province, the application of ideas to life. ”

“ Yester's quick greenage here set forth in mime
Just as it stands, now, at our breathing-time.
But these young foils so fresh upon each tree,
Soft verdures spread in sprouting novelty,
Are not this summer's, though they feign to be. ”